Jazz Improvisation Quotes

Life is a lot like jazz - it's best when you improvise.

Jazz improvisation is a speech without a script. It’s twelve notes and doing anything she pleases. There are no rules, no boundaries. Verbs don’t have to follow nouns. There is no gravity. Up can be down.

My method of writing is to take the most basic kind of line and improvise on it. After all, I am the child of the culture which created Jazz.

Jazz is the music of the body. The breath comes through brass. It is the body’s breath, and the strings’ wails and moans are echoes of the body’s music. It is the body’s vibrations which ripple from the fingers. And the mystery of the withheld theme, known to jazz musicians alone, is like the mystery of our secret life. We give to others only peripheral improvisations.

You had to account for every move, arrival or exit. In the world there was a conspiracy against improvisation. It was only permitted in jazz.

Life is a lot like jazz… it’s best when you improvise.

Learn the rules and then break them in such a way as to exercise good taste.

Language is not law; it is in fact a lot like music. Speech is jazz – first you learn the basic rules, and then you become good enough to improvise all the time. Writing is somewhat more like classical composition, where established forms and conditions will hold greater sway.

In a conversation with the master jazz musician and Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Wynton Marsalis, he told me, “You need to have some restrictions in jazz. Anyone can improvise with no restrictions, but that’s not jazz. Jazz always has some restrictions. Otherwise it might sound like noise.” The ability to improvise, he said, comes from fundamental knowledge, and this knowledge “limits the choices you can make and will make

One more nice thing about short stories is that you can create a story out of the smallest details -an idea that springs up in your mind, a word, an image, whatever. In most cases it's like jazz improvisation, with the story taking me where it wants to. And another good point is that with short stories you don't have to worry about failing. If the idea doesn't work out the way you hoped it would, you just shrug your shoulders and tell yourself that they can't all be winners. Even with masters of the genre like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Raymond Carver -even Anton Chekhov- not every short story is a masterpiece. I find this a great comfort. You can learn from your mistakes (in other words, those you can't call complete success) and use that in the next story you write.

visitors to Andean history note certain ways of doing things that recur in ways striking to the outsider, sometimes in one variant, sometimes in another, like the themes in a jazz improvisation.

Dinner is the most like jazz of all the meals, in that jazz is part form and part improvisation. You decide what you’re going to have, and then while you’re preparing it – because it’s the end of the day and you have the time – you have the room to consider things about it, to change things about it. You make it something new. “I think I’ll add a little chili powder.” ~ Seth Asa, age 37 From Dinnertimes: Stories of American Life, 1912 to 2012

That is what's important. The life of the line. When I draw, it's like tied and untied writing. My lines can be vivid or dead. The drawing is beautiful if the line is alive. A line is in danger of dying all along. My method of drawing is very much like jazz improvisation. I improvise with the lines and the colors. (...) There's great joy in drawing. Writing is drawing in different apparel, and drawing is another way of writing. And when I draw, I write. Perhaps when I write, I draw.

Life is a lot like jazz... it's best when you improvise.

Like Mormonism and Jazz, Parentology is a uniquely American, improvisational approach to the raising of children.

After a noticeable silence, he'd recently published a book of technically baffling poems, with line breaks so arbitrary and frequent as to be useless, arrhythmic. On the page they look like some of Charles Bukowski's skinny, chatty, muttering-stuttering antiverses. Impossibly, Mark's words make music, the faraway strains of an irresistible jazz. It's plain to any reader, within a few lines—well, go read the poems and see, Marcus Ahearn traffics with the ineffable. He makes the mind of the speaker present, in that here-and-now where the reader actually reads—that place. Such a rare thing. Samuel Beckett. Jean Follain, Ionesco—the composer Billy Strayhorn. Mark calls his process "psychic improvisation" and referred me to the painter Paul Klee; the term was Klee's. "You just get out a pen and a notebook and let your mind go long," he told me.

You’re like a pair of jazz musicians, forever improvising. Or perhaps you are not musicians, but your love manifests in the music. Sometimes, your head tucked into her neck, you can feel her heartbeat thudding like a kick drum. Your smile a grand piano, the glint in her eye like the twinkle of hands caressing ivory keys. The rhythmic strum of a double bass the inert grace she has been blessed with, moving her body in ways which astound. A pair of soloists in conversations so harmonious, one struggles to separate. You are not the musicians but the music.

Nature has evolved to be the inventor of complexity. Just as a jazz musician embroiders around a theme, thus improvising new melodic phrases according to his inspiration and the public's reactions, nature plays spontaneously with the physical laws that were fixed at the start of the universe. It uses them to create novelty9

A wise person knows when and how to make the exception to every rule. A wise person knows how to improvise. Real-world problems are often ambiguous and ill-defined and the context is always changing. A wise person is like a jazz musician -- using the notes on the page, but dancing around them, inventing combinations that are appropriate for the situation and the people at hand.

And, sure enough, saturation begins--the staedy work of seeps and springs. Then, suddenly, cottonwoods and willows spring from the sand, their leaves gyrating into a byzantine mosaic of greens. Birds, frogs, and insects trill out brilliant improvisations--a kind of critter jazz. And as the water gathers substance, there is the ballet of tadpoles and water skeeters across the face of clear ponds.

I have a lot of problems with fifteen-minute jazz-funk jams as well. I don’t care about instrumental prowess. I don’t care about quick-thinking improvisational skill. At all. I’m a songwriter and I’m familiar with Cage and I couldn’t really care about what notes people can think of quickly. It doesn’t interest me and I’m astounded that it interests other people still. Improvisation is what you do in the process of making something better.

Dinner is the most like jazz of all the meals, in that jazz is part form and part improvisation. You decide what you’re going to have, and then while you’re preparing it – because it’s the end of the day and you have the time – you have the room to consider things about it, to change things about it. You make it something new. ‘I think I’ll add a little chili powder.’” ~ Seth Asa, age 37 Dinnertimes: Stories of American Life, 1912 to 2012

Dinner is the most like jazz of all the meals, in that jazz is part form and part improvisation. You decide what you’re going to have, and then while you’re preparing it – because it’s the end of the day and you have the time – you have the room to consider things about it, to change things about it. You make it something new. “I think I’ll add a little chili powder.” ~ Seth Asa, age 37 From Dinnertimes: Stories of American Life, 1912 to 2012

It is no wonder that so much of the search for identity, among American Negroes, was championed by jazz musicians. Long before the modern essayists and scholars wrote of racial identity as a problem for a multiracial world, musicians were returning to their roots to affirm that which was stirring within their souls. Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from the music. It has strengthened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its rich harmonies when spirits were down. And now, Jazz is exported to the world. For, in a particular struggle of the Negro in America, there is something akin to the universal struggle of modern man. Everybody has the Blues. Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to clap hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith. In music, especially this broad category called jazz, there is a stepping-stone towards all these.

During the so-called Jazz Age, most of the music's key exponents focused their creative energy on soloing not bandleading, on improvisation not orchestration, on an interplay between individual instruments not between sections. [...] Commercial pressures, rather than artistic prerogatives, stand out as the spur that forced many early jazz players (including Armstrong, Beiderbecke, and Hines) to embrace the big band idiom. But even in the new setting, they remained improvisers, first and foremost, not orchestrators or composers.

Thinking would seem to be a completely solitary activity. And so it is for the other animal species. But for humans, thinking is like a jazz musician improvising a novel riff in the privacy of his own room. It is a solitary activity all right, but on an instrument made by others for that general purpose, after years of playing with and learning from other practitioners, in a musical genre with a rich history of legendary riffs, for an imagined audience of jazz aficionados. Human thinking is individual improvisation enmeshed in a sociocultural matrix.

These solo concerts were without precedent, not only in jazz history, but also in the entire history of the piano. They were not renditions of composed music committed to memory, nor were they a series of variations on composed themes. They were attempts at very long stretches (up to an hour at a time) of total improvisation, the creation from scratch of everything: rhythms, themes, structures, harmonic sequences and textures. Before a concert, Jarrett would try to empty himself of all preconceived ideas, and then allow the music to flow through and out of him. He said that if he was not able to empty himself he would, almost invariably, have a concert that was not as good. There might be periods when he seemed to be marking time but and feeling his way into a new area, but this was also part of the total experience which delighted and enthralled audiences. The sustained intensity of Jarrett’s inspiration during these marathons was literally awesome and, almost in the sense of preacher and congregation, he seemed to want the audiences to be not only witnesses but also participators on the occasion...

You're like a pair of jazz musicians, forever improvising. Or perhaps you are not musicians, but your love manifests in the music. Sometimes, your head tucked into her neck, you can feel her heartbeat thudding like a kick drum. Your smile a grand piano, the glint in her eye like the twinkle of hands caressing ivory keys. The rhythmic strum of a double bass the inert grace she has been blessed with, moving her body in ways which astound. A pair of soloists in conversations so harmonious, one struggles to separate. You are not the musicians but the music.

God has wrought many things out of oppression. He has endowed his creatures with the capacity to create and from this capacity has flowed the sweet songs of sorrow and joy that have allowed man to cope with his environment and many different situations. Jazz speaks for life. The Blues tell the story of life's difficulties, and if you think for a moment, you will realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph. This is triumphant music. Modern Jazz has continued in this tradition, singing the songs of a more complicated urban existence. When life itself offers no order and meaning, the musician creates an order and meaning from the sounds of the earth, which flow through his instrument.

There is in this a cruel contradiction implicit in the art form itself. For true jazz is an art of individual assertion within and against the group. Each true jazz moment (as distinct from the uninspired commercial performance) springs from a contest in which each artist challenges all the rest; each solo flight, or improvisation, represents (like the successive canvases of a painter) a definition of his identity: as individual, as member of the collectivity and as a link in the chain of tradition. Thus, because jazz finds its very life in an endless improvisation upon traditional materials, the jazzman must lose his identity even as he finds it — how often do we see even the most famous of jazz artists being devoured alive by their imitators, and, shamelessly, in the public spotlight?

Good conversation comes form just such flexibility. As observations come up, it meanders, following a course that tends in a particular direction, but moves responsively in new directions as associations are triggered, words are paused over to consider their implications, examples are invented, connections are made. Like jazz, it is a work of improvisation that entails listening intently for what the others are doing and moving with them. The curiosity which sustains that intensity pauses at every turn to notice what's happening, to raise new questions and pursue them. In a gentle pursuit of ideas, it makes room for the unexpected. Exercised in this way, curiosity becomes an avenue of grace. Conversation pursued in this spirit is full of surprise. It connects one idea or thought or analogy with another in ways that could not have been predicted.

Saturday and Sunday nights the long gray car would be parked among Fords and Chevrolets, as if it had littered or spawned on the gravel quay beside the club. Inside, the five-man Negro band pumped jazz—Button Up Your Overcoat and I’ll Get By and That’s My Weakness Now, interspersed with numbers that had been living before and would be living after: San and Tiger Rag and High Society—while the planters and bankers, the doctors and lawyers, the cotton men and merchants made a show of accompanying each other’s wives through the intricacies of the Charleston, the Black Bottom, the Barney Google, or else backed off and watched one of the women take a solo break, improvising, bobbing and weaving, wetting her thumbs and rolling her eyes, ritualistic, clinging desperately to the tail end of the jazz age—so desperately, so frantically indeed, that a person looking back upon that time might almost believe they had foreseen the depression and Roosevelt and another war and were dancing thus, Cassandra-like, in a frenzy of despair. Jeff

symphony isn’t what you’re going for. Leave the conductor and the sheet music behind. Build a jazz band instead. Jazz emphasizes individual spontaneity. The musicians know the overall structure of the song but have the freedom to improvise, riffing off one another other, creating incredible music. Of course, you can’t just remove the rules and processes, tell your team to be a jazz band, and expect it to be so. Without the right conditions, chaos will ensue. But now, after reading this book, you have a map. Once you begin to hear the music, keep focused. Culture isn’t something you can build up and then ignore. At Netflix, we are constantly debating our culture and expecting it will continually evolve. To build a team that is innovative, fast, and flexible, keep things a little bit loose. Welcome constant change. Operate a little closer toward the edge of chaos. Don’t provide a musical score and build a symphonic orchestra. Work on creating those jazz conditions and hire the type of employees who long to be part of an improvisational band. When it all comes together, the music is beautiful.

This guy Lobo, whose real and true name was Wolfgang Fink, played better than good flamenco guitar in a place called Mamma Mia in Puerto Vallarta. Had a partner name of Willie Royal, tall gangly guy who was balding a little early and wore glasses and played hot gypsy-jazz violin. They'd worked out a repertoire of their own tunes, "Improvisation #18" and "Gypsy Rock" as examples, played 'em high and hard, rolled through "Amsterdam" and "The Sultan's Dream" with enough power to set you two times free or even beyond that when the day had been tolerable and the night held promise. Lobo, sun worn and hard lined in the face looking over at Willie Royal bobbing and weaving and twisting his face into a mean imitation of a death mask when he really got into it, right wrist looking almost limp but moving his bow at warp speed across the strings, punctuated here and there by Lobo's stabbing ruscados and finger tapping on the guitar top. Good music, wonderful music, tight and wild all at the same time. On those nights when the sweat ran down your back and veneered your face and the gringitas looked good enough to swallow whole - knowing too they looked just that way and them watching the crowd to see who might be man enough to try it - people would be riding on the music, drinking and clapping in flamenco time, dancing around the dinner tables.

Fifteen years had passed since I first learned to improvise by copying George Shearing records. From the beginning, the goal was to move beyond imitation and find my own voice, and I felt that that was finally happening. Miles had been the guiding light to my growth, encouraging all of us in the band to develop our own styles of playing, and during my five and a half years in the quintet I did start to develop my own sound. But it wasn’t until I got out on my own that I felt I could really explore it. Now that I had my own sextet, I started thinking analytically about what actually goes on within a jazz group. At every moment onstage players are making choices, and each choice affects every other member of the group. So each player has to be prepared to change directions at any given moment—just as Miles did when I played that “wrong” chord onstage a few years earlier. Everybody in a jazz ensemble has learned the basic framework of harmony and scales and how they fit. They know the basic song structure of having the rhythm section—piano, bass, and drums—playing together while the horns carry the melody. But apart from those basics, jazz is incredibly broad. There are really uncountable ways of playing it. For the pianist alone there are so many choices to make: what pitch, how many notes, whether to play a chord or a line. I have ten fingers, and they’re in motion almost all the time, so all of those decisions must happen in an instant. I’m reacting to what the rest of the band is playing, but if I’m only reacting, then I’m not really making a choice; I’m just getting hit and being pushed along. Acting is making a choice, so all the players must be ready to act as well as react. The players have to be talented enough, and confident enough, to do both. I had watched Miles surround himself with amazing musicians and then give them the freedom to act.

Research tells us that brainstorming becomes more productive when it’s focused. As jazz great Charles Mingus famously said, “You can’t improvise on nothing, man; you’ve gotta improvise on something.

Advance Praise for THE GREAT NEW ORLEANS KIDNAPPING CASE: RACE, LAW, AND JUSTICE IN THE RECONSTRUCTION ERA "Michael Ross' The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case has all the elements one might expect from a legal thriller set in nineteenth-century New Orleans. Child abduction and voodoo. 'Quadroons.' A national headline-grabbing trial. Plus an intrepid creole detective.... A terrific job of sleuthing and storytelling, right through to the stunning epilogue." --Lawrence N. Powell, author of The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans "When little Mollie Digby went missing from her New Orleans home in the summer of 1870, her disappearance became a national sensation. In his compelling new book Michael Ross brings Mollie back. Read The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case for the extraordinary story it tells--and the complex world it reveals." --Kevin Boyle, author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age "Michael Ross's account of the 1870 New Orleans kidnapping of a white baby by two African-American women is a gripping narrative of one of the most sensational trials of the post-Civil War South. Even as he draws his readers into an engrossing mystery and detective story, Ross skillfully illuminates some of the most fundamental conflicts of race and class in New Orleans and the region." --Dan T. Carter, University of South Carolina "The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case is a masterwork of narration, with twists, turns, cliff-hangers, and an impeccable level of telling detail about a fascinating cast of characters. The reader comes away from this immersive experience with a deeper and sadder understanding of the possibilities and limits of Reconstruction." --Stephen Berry, author of House of Abraham: Lincoln and The Todds, a Family Divided by War "The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case is such a great read that it is easy to forget that the book is a work of history, not fiction. Who kidnapped Mollie Digby? The book, however, is compelling because it is great history. As Ross explores the mystery of Digby's disappearance, he reconstructs the lives not just of the Irish immigrant parents of Mollie Digby and the women of color accused of her kidnapping, but also the broad range of New Orleanians who became involved in the case. The kidnapping thus serves as a lens on the possibilities and uncertainties of Reconstruction, which take on new meanings because of Ross's skillful research and masterful storytelling." --Laura F. Edwards, Duke University

There is something more to be said about our freedom to improvise inside of the composer’s form. The jazz lifestyle of the kingdom of God is a communal freedom. Jazz musicians make harmonious music, not just because they stay inside an agreed upon musical structure, but because they play in community with one another. Good jazz musicians are not just good players; they are also very skilled listeners. Their jazz is always an interaction with what is going on around them. God hasn’t given us sheet music. He has composed a structure that liberates us to improvise within the structure, and all while listening intently to one another and to him. What is he doing in and through my brothers and sisters in this moment? How can I make music that is harmonious with what God is intending, and with what others need? These are the questions of the communal freedom of the kingdom of God.

Dinner is the most like jazz of all the meals, in that jazz is part form and part improvisation. You decide what you’re going to have, and then while you’re preparing it – because it’s the end of the day and you have the time – you have the room to consider things about it, to change things about it. You make it something new. “I think I’ll add a little chili powder.” ~ Seth Asa, age 37 From Dinnertimes: Stories of American Life, 1912 to 2012

The training for the race was really where the major life progress would occur. Think of a jazz musician giving a performance. It requires extensive preparation, but its content can’t necessarily be predicted. The musician can’t prepare for the concert by rehearsing what he knows he will play; it wouldn’t be jazz without improvisation

Because jazz musicians improvise under the pressure of time, what’s inside comes out pure. It’s like being pressed to answer a question before you have a chance to get your lie straight. The first thought is usually the truth.

Jazz was the opposite of everything Harry Anslinger believed in. It is improvised, and relaxed, and free-form. It follows its own rhythm. Worst of all, it is a mongrel music made up of European, Caribbean, and African echoes, all mating on American shores. To Anslinger, this was musical anarchy, and evidence of a recurrence of the primitive impulses that lurk in black people, waiting to emerge. “It sounded,” his internal memos said, “like the jungles in the dead of night.”94 Another memo warned that “unbelievably ancient indecent rites of the East Indies are resurrected”95 in this black man’s music. The lives of the jazzmen, he said, “reek of filth.”96 His agents reported back to him97 that “many among the jazzmen think they are playing magnificently when under the influence of marihuana but they are actually becoming hopelessly confused and playing horribly.” The Bureau believed that marijuana slowed down your perception of time98 dramatically, and this was why jazz music sounded so freakish—the musicians were literally living at a different, inhuman rhythm. “Music hath charms,”99 their memos say, “but not this music.” Indeed, Harry took jazz as yet more proof that marijuana drives people insane. For example, the song “That Funny Reefer Man”100 contains the line “Any time he gets a notion, he can walk across the ocean.” Harry’s agents warned: “He does think that.” Anslinger looked out over a scene filled with men like Charlie Parker,101 Louis Armstrong,102 and Thelonious Monk,103 and—as the journalist Larry Sloman recorded—he longed to see them all behind bars.104 He wrote to all the agents he had sent to follow them, and instructed: “Please prepare all cases in your jurisdiction105 involving musicians in violation of the marijuana laws. We will have a great national round-up arrest of all such persons on a single day. I will let you know what day.” His advice on drug raids to his men was always “Shoot first.”106 He reassured congressmen that his crackdown would affect not “the good musicians, but the jazz type.”107 But when Harry came for them, the jazz world would have one weapon that saved them: its absolute solidarity. Anslinger’s men could find almost no one among them who was willing to snitch,108 and whenever one of them was busted,109 they all chipped in to bail him out.

If any man seeks for greatness, let him forget greatness and ask for truth, and he will find both." -- Horace Mann

When I read Dawkins, it occurred to me that his theory suggested a useful way to think about the effects of psychoactive plants on culture—the critical role they’ve played at various junctures in the evolution of religion and music (think of jazz or rock improvisation), of poetry, philosophy, and the visual arts. What if these plant toxins function as a kind of cultural mutagen, not unlike the effect of radiation on the genome? They are, after all, chemicals with the power to alter mental constructs—to propose new metaphors, new ways of looking at things, and, occasionally, whole new mental constructs. Anyone who uses them knows they also generate plenty of mental errors; most such mistakes are useless or worse, but a few inevitably turn out to be the germs of new insights and metaphors. (And the better part of Western literature, if literary theorist Harold Bloom’s idea of “creative misreading” is to be believed.) The molecules themselves don’t add anything new to the stock of memes resident in a human brain, no more than radiation adds new genes. But surely the shifts in perception and breaks in mental habit they provoke are among the methods, and models, we have of imaginatively transforming mental and cultural givens—for mutating our inherited memes. •         •         • At the risk of discrediting my own idea, I want to acknowledge that it owes a debt—how large I can’t say—to a psychoactive plant. The notion that drugs might function as cultural mutagens occurred to me while reading The Selfish Gene while high on marijuana, which may or may not be an advisable thing to do.

The Borsht Belt became to stand-up comedy what New Orleans was to jazz -- an incubator of a new form of entertainment that gradually emerged from its formative center into the U.S. mainstream and beyond. Not that this comparison of Jewish comedy with jazz should obscure the contributions of Jews to the development of jazz itself, or black Americans to the growth of native comedy. The two forms of entertainment were similarly informal and improvisational. But the value placed by each community on its special cultural pastime dictated the opportunities for talented individuals within that community. Comedy and jazz depend on patronage, which rewards what it craves.

In jazz, they teach you how to improvise, he says, so that you are not just playing the music on the page. I don't know what to make of that. Not play the music on the page?

I know what I am doing here: I’m improvising. But what’s wrong with that? improvising as in jazz they improvise music, jazz in fury, improvising in front of the crowd.

The more ideas you compose based on the lick you learned, the more likely something magical will happen when you improvise.

To employ a cliché, Scott truly was a team player of the highest caliber whose individual contributions to jazz improvisation and bass playing are still having a major impact some forty-five years after his death. I

Successful startups are just like jazz bands, masters of improvisation marching to syncopated beats

Music was just one of the tools we employed to create excitement. The jazzman’s objective, however, was solely musical: Through his improvisation, he wanted to take people deep into his actual feelings and his world.

Moving to oriental or jazz while listening to drum beats or trance, take your own time and improvise. Wait not, now is the time to release the dancing vibes.

twenty-first-century companies would have to resemble small jazz combos as opposed to orchestras. Their members have to become skilled in improvising quickly with one another to achieve shared objectives rather than following a rigid script.

These solo concerts were without precedent, not only in jazz history, but also in the entire history of the piano. They were not renditions of composed music committed to memory, nor were they a series of variations on composed themes. They were attempts at very long stretches (up to an hour at a time) of total improvisation, the creation from scratch of everything: rhythms, themes, structures, harmonic sequences and textures. Before a concert, Jarrett would try to empty himself of all preconceived ideas, and then allow the music to flow through and out of him. He said that if he was not able to empty himself he would, almost invariably, have a concert that was not as good. There might be periods when he seemed to be marking time but and feeling his way into a new area, but this was also part of the total experience which delighted and enthralled audiences. The sustained intensity of Jarrett’s inspiration during these marathons was literally awesome and, almost in the sense of preacher and congregation, he seemed to want the audiences to be not only witnesses but also participators on the occasion…

Great growth firms are a lot like great jazz bands. While jazz is improvisational and entrepreneurial-like, the discipline underlying it allows even musicians who have never played together before to perform a rocking jam session.

You're like a pair of jazz musicians, forever improvising. Or perhaps you are not musicians, but your love manifests in the music. Sometimes, your head tucked into her neck, you can feel her heartbeat thudding like a kick drum. Your smile a grand piano, the glint in her eye like the twinkle of hands caressing ivory keys. The rhythmic strum of a double bass the inert grace she has been blessed with, moving her body in ways which astound. A pair of soloists in conversations so harmonious, one struggles to separate. You are not the musicians but the music.

I've always loved funky rustic quilts more than elegant and maybe lovelier ones. You see the beauty of homeliness and rough patches in how they defy expectations of order and comfort. They have at the same time enormous solemnity and exuberance. They may be made of rags, torn clothes that don't at all go together, but they somehow can be muscular and pretty. The colors are often strong, with a lot of rhythm and discipline and a crazy sense of order. They're improvised, like jazz, where one thing leads to another, without any idea of exactly where the route will lead, except that it will refer to something else maybe already established, or about to be. Embedded in quilts and jazz are clues to escape and strength, sanctuary and warmth. the world is always going to be dangerous, and people get badly banged up, but how can there be more meaning than helping one another stand up in a wind and stay warm?

Baking is like playing jazz—once you have the basics down, sometimes it's better to improvise.

If you go to a jam session, you can tell which players are scale players and which ones are not. The scale players sound like they’ve been rehearsing scales to play, not melodies to play. Don’t be a scale player. Be a melody player. Your ear should be informing you what to play, and theory should be there to support you and guide you along the way, not the other way around.

Sometimes you get so jazzed on the moment you can actually hear the universe sing, as you swing from life’s high notes and hit the low notes equally, improvising artistically without missing a beat or hanging on like a leech, leaving each passing moment to zone in on the texture of the next melodic tones life continually brings‬.

To love life...is to love bohemia... To love bohemia ... is to love life Cesca loves jazz ... to love jazz inspires Inspiration improvisation is life....

A heron swoops the water. A princely, primitive bird, each of its enormous slate-blue wings unfolds effortlessly as a chaise longue. The heron foot-drags the stream. Then it sails aloft and, turning, reveals the silhouette of a pteranodon. I like to divine the lasting essence of this place. I like to feel intimations of something akin to those tutelary spirits—near at hand, beyond spectrum of the visible—to whom Celts built menhirs and dolmens; spirits the pagan Romans called genii loci. Thracian shepherds would have known Duck Run inhabited by potamids, nymphs of rivers and streams. Shinto worshippers in Japan paid homage to divine spirits of leaves, to sacred life coursing through roots and bodies of trees, the kami spirits of wind and water. I like to feel what they felt. I like to hear what they heard: the land improvising always—in zephyr, in freshet—its oracular speech, its earth-jazz, its wild glossolalia.

the unfolding waves of sound are like an underwater orchestra or the endless improvisation of a jazz band. On the Great Barrier Reef, the humpback whales sing the soprano melody. Fish supply the chorus: whooping clownfish, grunting cod, and crunching parrotfish. Sea urchins scrape, resonating like tubas. Percussion is the domain of chattering dolphins and clacking shrimp, who use their pincers to create bubbles that explode with a loud bang. Lobsters rasp their antennae on their shells like washboards. Rainfall, wind, and waves provide the backbeat. To get the best seat, you would have to attend the concert in the middle of the night at the full moon, when fish chorusing typically crests. But you wouldn't necessarily need to have a front row seat: mass fish choruses can be heard up to 50 miles away, and whale sounds resonate for hundreds of miles.

Jazz emphasizes individual spontaneity. The musicians know the overall structure of the song but have the freedom to improvise, riffing off one another other, creating incredible music.

Don't provide a musical score and build a symphonic orchestra. Work on creating those jazz conditions and hire the type of employees who long to be part of an improvisational band. When it all comes together, the music is beautiful.

the way as the performances enhance and even change the original idea. This is not “improvisation,” this is like jazz: composition-in-the-moment.

Your technical ability should be informed by the musical ideas you want to express.

Life’s a lot like jazz... it's best when you improvise. George Gershwin

It might seem a contradiction but... the ability to improvise requires lots of practice. Ask any jazz musician.

What if there were a vibrational pattern in the early universe capable of generating the current complex structure that we live in, the complex structures that we are? And what if these structures had an improvisational nature.

contrary to the logical structure innate in physical law, in our attempts to reveal new vistas in our understanding, we often must embrace an irrational, illogical process, sometimes fraught with mistakes and improvisational thinking.

The uncertainty of being able to know both where a particle is and where it is going beautifully mirrors jazz improvisation. And isn't it mind blowing that the spectrum of vibrations that were amplified by inflation, those that led to the structure in our universe today, is the same as the spectrum of noise? Fundamental to it all is the Fourier addition of waves. The harnonic structure of the cosmic microwave background emerges from quantum noise, just as distinct beats and rhythms emerge from a fundamental waveform, an oscillation, a uniform repetition, a circle.

What, then, sets human brains apart? What makes us uniquely able to do what nonhuman brains cannot: appreciate music and understand mathematics? And to create new things under the sun: compose, improvise, discover new mathematical facts about the universe?

The difference between great improvisational jazz and great classical recitals is simple: in the first, there are no wrong notes. If someone makes a mistake, nobody cares or even notices. Everyone just keeps tapping their feet. In recitals, however, everyone expects perfection. We spend a lot more time doing recitals in our faith communities than I think Jesus had in mind. Stages, audiences, and platforms change us. People who are becoming love don’t need any of it. It’s not inherently bad to have all the stages, but we can end up playing to the wrong audience.

The first time I heard jazz, I had just moved to New York. One day I was wandering around Manhattan, looking for work, and there were these two guys on a corner. One played the banjo; the other was on the clarinet, improvising. There was a hat for people to drop coins in, but I was the only one paying them any attention. Even though I didn’t know a thing about jazz I could tell they were amateurs. But there was something about the music. It was sweet. And spicy. Kind of complicated. A little low-down. And intricate. And a little naughty.